A sojourn into games journalism, this piece, The Mystery of St Bride’s, was for the Retro section of GamesTM magazine, and was published in issue #142. It was reprinted in slightly revised form in the November 2020 issue of Retro Gamer.
The feature is an investigation into St Bride’s School, a fetishistic institution offering Victorian schoolgirl-style holidays for women in the early 1980s, which somehow had a sideline in publishing text adventure computer games. Researching this was real down-the-rabbit-hole stuff: the more I found out, the stranger it got. There was a bit of back-and-forth in the edit between my interest in what happened to the women operating the school after it closed, and the magazine’s (not unreasonable) desire to stay as focused on the games as possible. What follows is my own preferred draft. Scans of the feature as it appeared in the magazine are at the end of the page.